A succession of military dictators followed Pridi's ouster—Phibun again, Sarit Thanarat, then Thanom Kittikachorn—under whom traditional, authoritarian rule was combined with increasing modernisation and Westernisation under the influence of the United States.

A royalist reaction came in late 1933 when Prince Boworadet, a grandson of Mongkut and one-time Minister of Defence, led an armed revolt against the government.

After heavy fighting in the northern outskirts of Bangkok, the royalists were finally defeated and Prince Boworadet left for exile in French Indochina.

Phibun and Luang Wichitwathakan, the government's ideological spokesman, copied the propaganda techniques used by Hitler and Mussolini to build up the cult of the leader.

At the same time Phibun passed a number of authoritarian laws which gave the government the power of almost unlimited arrest and complete press censorship.

During the Second World War, newspapers were instructed to print only good news emanating from Axis sources, while sarcastic comments about the internal situation were banned.

To accomplish that, the Thai government needed Japanese assistance against France, which was secured through the Treaty between Thailand and Japan Concerning the Continuance of Friendly Relations and the Mutual Respect of Each Other's Territorial Integrity, concluded in June 1940.

On 18 July 1940, the British government accepted Japanese demands to close the Burma Road for three months to prevent war supplies from reaching China.

Luang Wichit wrote a number of popular dramas that glorified the idea of many ethnic groups belonging to a greater "Thai" empire and condemned the evils of European colonial rule.

Pridi, now serving in the role of an almost powerless regent, led the resistance movement inside Thailand, while former Queen Ramphaiphanni was the nominal head in Great Britain.

Secret training camps were set up in remote areas, the majority by the populist politician Tiang Sirikhanth in the northeast region of the country.

By early 1945, Thai air force officers were performing liaison duties with South East Asia Command in Kandy and Calcutta.

Coupled with economic hardships caused by the loss of Thailand's rice export markets, this made both the war and Phibun's regime very unpopular.

The new government hastily evacuated the British territories that Phibun had occupied and surreptitiously aided the Seri Thai movement, while at the same time maintaining ostensibly friendly relations with the Japanese.

Britain regarded Thailand as having been partly responsible for the damage dealt to the Allied cause and favoured treating the kingdom as a defeated enemy.

The regent's looming presence and overarching authority rankled the proud, thin-skinned Seni, fuelling a personal animosity that would poison Thailand's postwar politics.

In 1946, after he agreed to hand back the Indochinese territories occupied in 1941 as the price for admission to the United Nations, all wartime claims against Siam were dropped and a substantial package of US aid was received.

In December 1945, the young King Ananda Mahidol had returned to Siam from Europe, but in June 1946, he was found shot dead in his bedroom under mysterious circumstances.

Three palace servants were tried and executed for his murder, although there are significant doubts as to their guilt and the case remains both murky and a highly sensitive topic in Thailand today.

He soon won the support of the US, beginning a long tradition of US-backed military regimes in Thailand (as the country was again renamed in July 1949, this time permanently).

In the navy's 1951 attempt, popularly known as the Manhattan Coup, Phibun was nearly killed when the ship where he was held hostage was bombed by the pro-government air force.

Sarit and Thanom were the first Thai leaders to have been educated entirely in Thailand, and were less influenced by European political ideas, whether fascist or democratic, than the generation of Pridi and Phibun had been.

The Vietnamese retaliated by supporting the Communist Party of Thailand's insurgency in the north, northeast, and sometimes in the south, where guerrillas co-operated with local discontented Muslims.

[14] A declassified Department of Defense report written in 1973, suggests that there was a significant use of herbicides on the fenced-in perimeters of military bases in Thailand to remove foliage that provided cover for enemy forces.

When these regions had been organised into the centralised Siamese state in King Chulalongkorn's reign, the old local nobility had been allowed to grab large tracts of land.

The protests focused on land loss, high rents, the heavy-handed role of the police, corruption among the bureaucracy and the local elites, poor infrastructure, and overwhelming poverty.

Thanom came under increasing pressure to loosen his grip on power when the king commented that it was time for parliament to be restored and a new constitution put into effect.

[citation needed] Hence, the Constituent Assembly was filled with military appointees loyal to the Revolutionary Party, and power became more centralized in the executive branch.

The demonstrations swelled to several hundred thousand and the issue broadened from the release of the arrested students to demands for a new constitution and the replacement of the current government.

An hour later, the king appeared on national television, asking for calm, and announcing that Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn had been replaced with Dr. Sanya Dharmasakti, a respected law professor, as prime minister.